Resistance is normal. Whenever you try to introduce something new, you
will get resistance. Just as a salesperson meets and overcomes objections,
so also must the successful creative person learn to turn their creativity
to overcoming the resistance to new ideas. Nevertheless, it is still
really annoying.

‘Innovation—any new idea—by definition will not be accepted at first. It
takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, and monotonous rehearsals
before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This
requires "courageous patience.".’

‘Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing
great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in
nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.’

‘The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with
which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance
innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.’

‘First a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true,
but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its
adversaries claim they themselves discovered it.’

‘So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built
with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give
it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you. ‘And
they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we
don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’.’

‘The mind, I have discovered, is very clever. As soon as it recognizes that
it is entering territory where it is not in charge, it becomes very protective.
It quickly begins inventingreasons to stop, because it does not want to let
go.’

‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot
of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope
and, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and
daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep
down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’

‘The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually
antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of
taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed
against them, and against all who have traffic with them.’

‘It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with
them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on
them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on,
we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used
to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses.’

‘A new scientifictruth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a
new generation grows up that is familiar with it..’

‘But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who
are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton,
they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.’

‘The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively not by the false
appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by
weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.’

‘I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of
conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they
have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into
the fabric of their lives.’

‘The mind likes a strange ideas as little as the body likes a strange protein
and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say
that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. It we watch
ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new
idea even before it has been completely stated.’

‘One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast
to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a
goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just
stupid.’

— J. D. Watson

‘New and stirring ideas are belittled, because if they are not belittled the
humiliating question arises, "Why, then, are you not taking part in them?".’
—H. G. Wells

‘In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many
instances invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor
is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application
of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.’